Unveiling Meta Tags

Meta tags are a simple process to complete for your website. The main focus behind meta tags is relevance. The three main meta tags that you will want to focus on for all of your pages are the title, keywords and description tags. There are many other tags, and some have their uses but for marketing purposes lets focus on these main tags.

First you will want to research keywords related to your products if necessary. These will be the basis of your meta tags because what people are searching for related to your products you will want to reaffirm to help promote your websites relevance for those phrases. Simply put if it relates to your products, you will want to include it on the most relevant pages set of meta tags.

There are many different opinions about proper setup and character count. My goal is to give you the information as to how and why, you as a business owner can make an informed decision. First compose a general list of keywords for your website, the more categories / products the more potential keywords. Again you can use wordtracker to get an idea of what people are searching for, I use it strictly as a guideline though. Now create a hierarchy – if the whole site is about guitars, then you will most likely have guitars as the first keyword on your homepage keywords tag and somewhere in the title tag as well. However if you offer all kinds of musical instruments and have a specific category for guitars, your homepage is going to mainly promote musical instruments with the specific / most relevant page reaffirming guitars within the meta tags.

Title

The title tag should include at least your most important keyword phrase, the general phrase for your whole site, but can be composed as a general statement including the name of the website as well. Keep in mind that the title tag is the most important meta tag and your I try and always set them up with my most important 2 to 3 keyword phrases especially for subcategories.

Generally the title can be around 90 characters, Google is said to index around 80 but other index more, so again a business decision.

or

<title>Business Name and what I offer</title>

<title>Keyword phrase, Keyword phrase2, Keyword phrase3</title>

Keywords

The keywords meta tag is designed strictly to be a list of keywords that are relevant to that specific page with your website. I suggest around 15 keyword phrases simply separated by commas and spaces.

Description

The description tag is simply a one sentence summary of what the page offers that I generally utilize to also incorporate my top 2 to 3 keyword phrases for that page in order to continue with the idea of reaffirmation.